Bounding the Case

The Commonsense Bounding of the Case

Case studies are often focused on entities that have relatively clearly defined spatial boundaries as they are experienced and conceptualized in everyday life, such as the borders of states or the walls bounding prisons or schools. Such organizational boundaries are often clearly marked, monitored, and managed. As a consequence, researchers often have to negotiate their access to such research settings through gatekeepers, the relevant “authorities” or other participants who may grant or deny particular forms of access or approval.

Thus case study researchers must always be sensitive to the ways in which social actors, whether onlookers or participants, themselves conceptualize and act in relation to institutional boundaries surrounding the phenomenon being studied. This may be relatively straightforward for formally organized and strongly institutionalized social entities, but setting boundaries remains a concern where boundaries are more amorphous or contentious, say in relation to a neighborhood, gang, subculture, or ethnic group. In these cases the form, extent, and consequences of demarcation, gatekeeping, and monitoring, and hence the extent and character of commonsense bounding, are more evidently problematical but are still significant, both for the conduct of the research and as a source of analytical insight.

However, researchers must also problematize actors' understandings of the bounding of any case study entity, including those apparently more solid and clearly demarcated organizations that seem to constitute naturally bounded cases to be studied. Informants may themselves seek to redefine the ways they understand and experience the boundaries of their activities, and it is likely that competing criteria by which actors bound the case are in play. Furthermore, the permeability or even precariousness of established boundaries may be underlined by the flows of people, symbols, and materials that cross them, highlighting the potential for the reconfiguration of such boundaries. Thus the analytical agendas and empirical investigations of researchers are likely to identify social processes that crosscut dominant institutionalized ways of bounding the case, inviting a reconceptualization of the case in terms that are not simply dependent upon commonsense readings of such boundaries.

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